I've been on a few forums looking for a solution to this problem. Your driving along, you look down at your dash to find nothing on the cluster is working. The speed, tach and temp gages all drop to zero. It appears the gas gage still works, but no. If you ever noticed when you turned off the engine your gas gage stays right where it was so the same thing happens when you loose your cluster. Then meraculously after a period of time or turning off the car you come back to find all your gages working normally. It seems it happens to a lot of people and no one has a good fix other then replacing the dash with a new one or a used one with a 50/50 chance of it happening again; not to mention having the wrong milage displayed.
From what I've found, the problem is with a "Unified Meter Control Unit" on the integrated circuit board on the back of the cluster and really no way to replace it. It appears this generates heat over time and shuts down the whole cluster. After it cools, everything works again. There is no "heat sync" to disapate the heat generated. A lot of folks want to tack down a bad fuse, relay, or ground, but there are no other functions of the car that are effected. Here is how I fixed the problem.
I took the dash out and removed the black plastic cover on the back of the cluster. Then mounted a small 12V dc fan (got mine from on old computer) to sit just to the right behind the cluster. Ran a wire to ACC in the fuse panel (fan runs only while key is on) and one to ground. To keep the circuit board cooler I didn't replace the black plastic only the screws. The little fan runs very quiet and you don't really hear it. So far I've had no problems with the dash going dead. Here are some photos. Hope this helps someone.
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08-14-2011, 10:36 AM
